This panel explores how multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual perspectives from and about Asian—especially Chinese— frontiers and borderlands inform and contest narrative constructions of nation, region, language, and culture. The panel brings together scholars from the U.S. and Europe to forge new conversations about multicultural Asia. Building upon Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” as a culturally productive space of hybridity and cross-fertilizations, we seek to broaden the notion of narrative both within and beyond literature. We inquire into how cultural, religious, and social developmental narratives from the geographical and political “peripheries” of Asia intersect to produce discursive regimes that cut across various boundaries, questioning traditional centers of epistemological and political power. In doing so, this panel contributes to ongoing debates about pushing the boundaries of Area Studies, as it highlights narrative inventions of identity across different regions within and beyond Asia. Each paper will be 13 minutes with 2 minutes of speaker intro/transition, and we will have 15 minutes of open discussion at the end.
The first two papers analyze modern ethnonational narratives in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, which straddle the vast multilingual regions of China and Inner Asia. Daigengna Duoer will discuss the female gaze of Liu Manqing (1906-1941), a woman envoy and interpreter sent into the Sino-Tibetan borderlands by China’s Nationalist government under Chiang Kai- shek to improve Sino-Tibetan relations in the 1920s and 1930s. Through revealing Liu’s metropolitan, colonial, and feminine gaze at Lamaism, or Inner Asia Buddhism, Duoer’s paper illuminates how Liu’s gendered and Muslim positionalities allowed her to see Tibet not only as a place dominated by male Buddhist elites (as many contemporary conventional accounts of Tibet do), but as a multicultural and multireligious frontier diverse with often excluded groups such as Lhasa Muslims and women of different social ranks.
Yanshuo Zhang investigates the visual and epistemological construction of ethnic frontiers in China during the polemic era of China’s war with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Highlighting the emergence of modern disciplines such as ethnology and anthropology in China, Zhang traces how the “translated modernity” of ethnonational discourses in China was construed through China’s indigenization of Western multimedia technologies and epistemological methodologies, such as ethnography, photography, and illustrated magazines. Zhang demonstrates how these technologies and methodologies unsettle the boundaries and borders between “civilization” and “barbarity” that were historically imagined and maintained in the Himalayas.
Susan McCarthy extends the panel’s focus on unsettling boundaries and borders to the twenty-first century in her study of Chinese subregional development narratives that recast the periphery as center. McCarthy’s paper explores the narrative dimensions of economic development projects in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a poor and predominantly Muslim province. In an effort to attract domestic and international investment, Ningxia’s political, ethnic, and business elites have advanced a strategic narrative, articulated through a variety of media formats, that stresses the region’s cultural affinities wit the Muslim world and the economic and diplomatic benefits these affinities entail. While drawing on tropes and themes from nationalistic interpretations of China’s economic, cultural, and technological transformation, this narrative challenges those interpretations’ Han-centric assumptions by framing peripheral Ningxia and its Muslim inhabitants as central protagonists in China’s growth story. In doing so, this narrative contests how China, Chinese culture, and the global Muslim umma are discursively constructed and imagined.
Lastly, Martina Renata Prosperi concludes the panel by engaging with the global implications of the multicultural and multilingual forces examined by the entire panel. Prosperi looks into the narrative politics of Anglophone Chinese American writer Yiyun Li. Li’s early "obsession" with the Chinese background in her literary career gives way to a more in-depth reflection on the contemporary world we live in (regardless of national borders and conditioning), on human relations and, above all, on language. Li's contribution to global literature lies in her dissociation from any conventional, crystallized, imprisoning and uncritical use of language. Prosperi unveils the linguistic revolutions in Li’s narratives as Li traverses the transnational world across the Pacific, bringing Asian literary and cultural sensibilities to the world and vice versa.